Kristin Davis has allied herself in the fight to protect the elephants of Kenya with the David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust, a renowned orphan-elephant rescue and rehabilitation program and a pioneering conservation organization for wildlife and habitat protection in East Africa

Photography:

Andrew Macpherson

She is most famous for her role as Charlotte York in the hit HBO show Sex and the City, but these days Kristin Davis would probably prefer to be best known for advocating to protect elephants, which are being slaughtered to the point of extinction by poachers who sell the ivory contained in the elephants’ tusks for big profits on the black market.

“Did you know that elephants will soon be extinct?” Davis MGSA’87 asks in a plea for donations to the Kristin Davis Foundation, appearing on the website crowdrise.com. “Every 15 minutes, an elephant is brutally killed for its tusks. Every day, elephants are being attacked by poachers with poisoned arrows, spears, deadly snares, and guns.”

Davis, who became aware of the elephants’ plight during a Kenyan safari, travels frequently to Africa, where she has allied herself in the fight to protect the elephants of Kenya with the David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust, a renowned orphan-elephant rescue and rehabilitation program and a pioneering conservation organization for wildlife and habitat protection in East Africa. Davis—a 2009 inductee into the Hall of Disting­uished Alumni who resides in California where she is raising her adopted daughter, Gemma—also has a Facebook page, loaded with information about the elephants’ plight and how people can make contributions in different ways.

“I want to thank everyone who has shown so much support for the David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust,” she wrote on November 15, one of her many entries. “Right now, we have 40 orphans in the nursery in Nairobi, an all-time high in the history of the trust. Yesterday, we crushed the U.S. stockpile of illegally seized ivory, a first step in a total ban on ivory sales in the United States. I saw it as a huge funeral to pay our respects to those elephants who have died from poaching and a promise to them that we will protect their babies.”

So concerned is Davis about threatened elephants that she is of a mind to quit acting and move to Kenya, she revealed in a cover story for Haute Living, “But they’re telling me that I can’t [quit acting] because they need me to be famous so people will listen to me.” She also told the magazine that she hasn’t ruled out appearing in a third Sex and the City movie.

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